By the Sweat of Their Brow

Women workers at Victorian Coal Mines

Angela V. John

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136599385
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The pit brow lasses who sorted coal and performed a variety of jobs above ground at British coal mines prompted a violent debate about women's work in the nineteenth century.

Seen as the prime example of degraded womanhood, the pit brow woman was regarded as an aberration in a masculine domain, cruelly torn from her 'natural sphere', the home. The, attempt to restrict women's work at the mines in the 1880s highlights the dichotomy between the fashionable ideal of womanhood and the necessity and reality of female manual labour.

Although only a tiny percentage of the colliery labour force, the pit lasses aroused an interest out of all proportion to their numbers and their work became a test case for women's outdoor manual employment. Angela John discusses the implications of this debate, showing how it encapsulates many of the ambivalences of late Victorian attitudes towards working-class female employment, and at the same time raises wider questions both about women's work in industries seen as traditionally male enclaves, and about the ways in which women within the working community have been presented by historians.This book was first published in 1980.

PART I: THE LEGACY

Its echoing noises, its tremendous gloom

To her are all familiar and benign;

A child of toil, a daughter of the mine

A.J. Munby ‘Leonard and Elizabeth’, unpublished MS poem

Winding: the Children’s Employment Commission, 1842

Winding: The Westminster Review’s version, 1842

1	BELOW GROUND
	The stalwart frame of robust man,
	The sylph-like form of women frail,
	The tender flesh of children wan
	Come all within the mining pale
	To work for ducals’ grand regale.

A.Wilson ‘Slaves of the Mine’ in Lays, Tales

and Folk Lore of the Mines (Perth, 1944 edition).

The tradition of women working in coal mines had a profound effect on attitudes towards their work at the surface or pit brow. Contemporaries simply confused the two, believing that anything under the label of women’s work at mines must be similar to the situation described in the Children’s Employment Commission of 1842. This perpetuated a false link between very different types of work. As late as the 1880s respected journals such as the Lancet could condemn this ‘disgusting’ work, making the basic mistake of assuming that women still worked in pits when in fact they had been prohibited by law from such work nearly fifty years earlier!¹

Even for those who knew slightly better, the legacy of the earlier memories remained strong. Accounts of pit brow women invariably began with descriptions of saturnine caverns. A mention of the picking belts where women sorted coal from dirt was frequently prefaced by an account of the better known belt and chain which had harnessed women and children to their tubs of coal underground. Female surface work was therefore portrayed as an anachronism, a sad vestige of the barbaric days before the legislation of 1842.² The late-nineteenth-century attempt to prohibit pit brow work was seen as the necessary completion of a process begun many years earlier, a natural corollary to an investigation which had revealed profoundly disturbing facts. Such a social evil clearly ran counter to the feminine ideal and must be completely blotted out. Until 1842 ‘civilised society’ had remained blissfully ignorant of women’s work in mines. Fear of a repetition of the complacency which had existed before Lord Ashley’s shock exposures of pit work meant that there must be no opportunity for falling into a similar trap – being caught unawares again. Yet this does not mean that those concerned individuals came any nearer to understanding the nature of colliery communities, or even recognising that it might be important to do so. It does however explain how people could busy themselves with enquiries into pit work which purported to be fulfilling a duty and moral obligation. In the 1840s the revelations of coal mining horrors were unfolded in the midst of economic depression and political unrest. In the wake of the anti-slavery campaign they produced striking parallels which the press eagerly seized upon.³ By the 1880s a country steeped in imperial forays had developed a sense of mission at home, another belated catharsis. The new campaign to remove colliery women was also a concatenation of memories of 1842 and part of the continuing dilemma of the right of women to work.

Women had worked in coal mines for centuries, wives and daughters playing a vital role in the family economy, helping husbands and brothers to extract coal from easily accessible holes. The family organisation makes it difficult to obtain precise information about its origins or the way in which it adapted as coal mining techniques became more sophisticated. It is significant but frustrating to note that the Sub-Commissioners for the Children’s Employment Commission did not recognise the value of questioning the background to the work which they so readily condemned. Nor are there any national statistics of female colliery labour prior to 1841. In fact the paucity of early sources means that we know far more about women ceasing to work underground than we do about how long and where they had worked in the first place. Descriptions of conditions must therefore remain largely conjectural. The earliest known reference to a woman working concerns an Emma Culhare (or Culhaxe) who lost her life at a lead mine in Derbyshire after a firedamp explosion in 1322.⁴ Several cases are documented of women working in coal mines in the sixteenth century but they need to be treated with caution as sporadic references must not be confused with knowledge of regular work. There is however some evidence that women were working at Winlaton colliery in the north-east as early as 1587.⁵ Further information about early employment can be gleaned from reports of colliery disasters and coroners’ inquests.⁶

In the eighteenth century the employment of women was still part of a family concern, male members utilising the help of their female relatives wherever possible. Since the hiring and payment would be the responsibility of the male collier, women were not usually recorded in colliery accounts.⁷ Their main task was to work as drawers. This involved pulling sledges or tubs along the pit floor or on planks from the coal face to the bottom of the shaft. (Drawers were known as putters in Fifeshire and in Yorkshire they were called hurriers. Terms varied from district to district and in the following pages the terms peculiar to the district being discussed will be the ones used.) Frequently working in wet, cramped conditions, the severity of the job could be intensified by the degree of the incline of the roof which followed the rise and dip of the seam. Age, strength, size, the weight of the load, state of the atmosphere and demands of the collier could also make a considerable difference. Drawers crawled along the floors harnessed to their tubs by a belt of leather or rope. This passed around the waist or shoulder and from it a chain passed between the legs and was hooked on to the tub. Such a primitive form of haulage survived in certain areas until the 1840s.⁸

Some districts appear to have employed female labour before but not during the nineteenth century. Women had ceased to work in the Northumberland-Durham coalfield by about 1780.⁹ They may also have worked in Shropshire coal pits – they had certainly been employed in stone and iron pits there.¹⁰ In Cumberland women’s work was actually more extensive and diversified before the nineteenth century than it became later. Women worked as bearers, fillers, hookers of baskets, cleaners and as horse drivers. Yet by 1841 such work was unknown in all but one colliery there, due to the ‘general odium it excites’.¹¹ Women were not employed below ground in the coalfields of Gloucestershire, North Somerset, Warwickshire, Leicestershire or Staffordshire though in the southern part of the last county, they did work on the surface as was the practice in North Wales. In Yorkshire and Lancashire women worked below ground before and during the nineteenth century. A story based on a true situation at a Lancashire pit in the late eighteenth century describes how a female drawer did a daily double turn (shift). The Lancashire Collier-Girl, written by Joseph Budworth but published anonymously in the Gentleman’s Magazine (May 1795) was later reworked and printed as one of Hannah More’s cheap religious tracts – with a typically strong moral exhortation.¹² After her father’s death and financial troubles, Betty Hodson had to work in the pit to rescue her family from the ignominy of the workhouse. She eventually received her reward by gaining a place as an under-servant in the household of the charitable Benevolus of Hospitality Hall (in reality the coalowner William Bankes of Winstanley). By 1798 her exemplary behaviour had earned her promotion to the position of head cook.¹³

The work of Lancashire pitwomen was not however as widespread or severe as that in Scotland. Women here worked mainly in the eastern part of the country though there are scattered references to female work in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire prior to the nineteenth century. It was part of a system of slavery which had been imposed by an act of 1606, was reinforced in 1641 and lasted until 1799 since an early emancipation act of 1774 was virtually ineffective. Whole collier and salter families were bound in servitude to employers, lacking any real freedom. Originally designed to cope with a shortage of labour during the expansion of the coal and salt trade, this attempt to prevent owners appropriating miners meant binding families for life. It ensured that ‘wives, daughters and sons went on from generation to generation under the system which was the family doom’.¹⁴ Some women drew baskets of coal from the face to the pit bottom but the most arduous work was done by bearers who carried coal on their backs, climbing up steep, winding staircases to the pit hills.¹⁵ Armed with a short stick and a candle held between their teeth they would work for eight or ten hours without a rest. The coal was carried in wicker creels or baskets with supporting straps which went around the forehead. 120 lb might be carried on a single journey over a distance of a hundred and fifty yards, followed by an ascent of about a hundred feet and a further twenty yards to the pit hill. This might be repeated twenty-four times in a day. The hewer who extracted the coal from the face generally engaged two bearers and perhaps shared a third ‘fremit’ (non-relative) with a fellow worker. Bearing had developed through the difficulty of working the edge seams but it had, unjustifiably, also spread to the neighbouring flat collieries. Some attempts were made to substitute windlasses but they were costly and the Sub-Commissioner finding the practice still in force in 1841 described it as ‘unexampled in severity and most revolting in nature’.¹⁶

Bearers had been employed in South Pembrokeshire but by the turn of the century the system was obsolescent. Even in the seventeenth century some pits had boasted primitive windlasses known locally as a ‘druke and beam’.¹⁷ The 1842 report described women using windlas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• New Copyright Page
• Old Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I: The Legacy
• 1. Below Ground
• 2. Exposition, Exclusion and Evasion
• Part II: At the Pit Brow
• 3. The Daily Work
• 4. The Headquarters
• Part III: The Test Case
• 5. The Confluence of Opinion
• 6. A Pit Brow Protest?
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Appendix I: Munby’s Visits to Pit Women
• Appendix II: The Open Door Policy
• Bibliographical Note
• Index